Technical Field
This disclosure relates to electronic design automation (EDA). More specifically, this disclosure relates to pattern-based power-and-ground routing and via creation.
Related Art
Power-and-ground (PG) nets refer to the nets in an integrated circuit that supply power and ground voltages to circuit elements. Conventional techniques typically create a PG net by individually creating and connecting a large number of wire segments. For example, conventional techniques typically create a PG net by using a script that individually creates each wire segment in the PG net, i.e., each wire segment that is created in the PG net corresponds to the execution of a command that creates a single wire segment.
Such conventional approaches have many drawbacks. In particular, the scripts that are used to create PG nets are becoming unmanageably complex due to the rapidly increasing size and complexity of circuit designs. It is not uncommon for a company to have a team of dedicated engineers for creating and maintaining these scripts. Furthermore, whenever a floorplan of a circuit design is modified, the script also usually needs to be modified. The process of modifying the script and then checking the modified script can take a long time. Due to these drawbacks conventional script-based approaches can easily add a few weeks to the total turn-around-time for modifying the circuit design floorplan.
Therefore, what are needed are systems and techniques for PG routing without the above-described problems.